


a sombre yet beautiful gloom

by bluebacchus



Series: the verge of remembrance [1]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: (with the novel), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cannibalism, Canon Compliant, Clairvoyant Edward Little, Hand Feeding, M/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, guilt shame and boners, tender cold boys eating tender cold meat, the reversible nature of late state scurvy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-04 05:43:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20465960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebacchus/pseuds/bluebacchus
Summary: “What do you want?”Jopson pressed his whiskered cheek against Little’s lank, shaggy hair.“You.” Little’s heart leapt into his throat. “And me. To survive.”Edward Little finds his way to Rescue Camp.





	a sombre yet beautiful gloom

**Author's Note:**

> I read the entire novel in three days and then sat down and wrote this in one sitting. It mostly follows the novel’s timeline but with the superior (IMO) characterizations from AMC. 
> 
> In other words, Crozier and Silna are clairvoyant BFFs, Little disappeared and is presumed dead after the Tunbaaq’s attack on the whaleboat at the lake, and Davey Leys has been catatonic since they left Terror.
> 
> The major divergence is that Little is also gifted with the Second Sight and Jopson’s hair doesn’t fall out. We tackle the important issues here in The Terror fandom. 
> 
> BIG WARNINGS for cannibalism and inappropriate boners 
> 
> Title is from Poe’s The Island of the Fay.

_In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, and in awakening, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret._

\- Edgar Allen Poe, Eleonora

_20 August, 1848_

He had left the warmth of the snow house four hours ago with a full belly and dry socks. Lady Silence had given him a stack of Goldner’s cans filled with raw seal meat, which Little had, with a grimace, removed and stashed in the pocket of his greatcoat. He left the cans and their poison outside in the snow. The raw seal was frozen now, weighing his left pocket down and banging against his thigh with each step he took. He wondered if it would bruise. He wondered if it mattered.

* * *

It had been a month, he was sure. A month at least. A month since his last spark of hope died as he and his crew aboard the whaleboat found that the open water was a façade; a lake enclosed in thick pack ice. The land was making a mockery of them, he remembered thinking before Peglar pointed out the boulder that hadn’t been there before and the men panicked and there was nothing First Lieutenant Edward Little could do about it. They crashed the boat against the ice to the left of the Beast and it was upon them before any of them reached the shore. Little lost track of everyone during the assault; he was blinded by the spray of blood, deafened by the screams of his men (_the men he was entrusted with, the men he was in charge of, the men he commanded and led to their deaths_) and a single splash as Peglar dove overboard into the icy lake. He remembers hearing the splash as if it were in slow motion, and suddenly, he saw the world in perfect clarity.

He remembered, amidst the chaos of carnage, a long-forgotten childhood nightmare where he watched a man stand among the blood and guts of his crew, the smell of rot drifting from the bow where a white shape, eyes burning like dying stars, bored into him with its horrible gaze. The Thing ripped young Alex Berry apart, the last man standing between Little and the jaws of the Beast. It tossed Berry’s torso into the water, where Little watched it bob for a moment before sinking below the black surface. Little wondered if he had always been the man in the dream, and opened his mouth.

* * *

He thought it was a hallucination when he saw the tents in the distance across the endless planes of shale. He blinked, shading his eyes with his hand. The shapes did not disappear. Little altered his course slightly and headed towards the camp. As he grew closer, traveling at the fastest pace he’d travelled since they first abandoned ship, he could make out smaller shapes, and the movement of even smaller shapes surrounding them. He walked for another mile before he realized with a start that they were leaving the camp with the boats. With no equipment and a month’s steady diet of seal meat, Little sped his pace, confident for the first time in years that he wouldn’t collapse before he reached his destination.

It was another hour of walking before he arrived at the camp, at which point the fog had rolled in and he had lost all sight of the crew. There were three tents still set up, and Little wondered if Captain Crozier had decided to make a run for help, leaving the ill and the injured. He shook the idea out of his head. After three years in his service, Little knew Crozier would never abandon any man to die unless it risked the life of another man.

_Maybe it did_, a voice inside him said. _Maybe they know you’re coming. Maybe they know you’re unnatural._

He quieted the thoughts the way his mother taught him to. He breathed in the frigid air slowly, exhaling through his mouth as if he was blowing to cool down the boiling cups of tea he used to share with Jopson while he was acting captain of _Terror._ He remembered the way Jopson would bring his to him in his quarters, knocking quietly with his foot because he held a cup of tea in each hand. He would offer Little a choice of which cup he would like, a small smile playing across his lips as if it were a game. Maybe it was a game, Little had thought at the time, but it was one Jopson always won, if his smile when Little reached for a cup was anything to judge by. It felt wrong, then, to send him away, and Little would shift over on his cot and let Jopson sit beside him, sometimes in silence, sometimes talking about the Captain, and sometimes doing nothing but telling stories of past voyages as they laughed until their tea turned to ice in their cups.

It felt like a lifetime ago.

Before they abandoned ship, before they had begun to drop like flies, before the Thing had started stalking them across the ice. Before he had looked into its eyes and felt its gaze penetrate his very soul. Before it had blown a gust of putrid air into his face and he felt it resonate down his throat, wringing an unnatural sound from the depths of his being. Before it had retreated, sliding into the water as if it was itself liquid, rising on the other side and watching, unmoving, as Harry Peglar pulled himself from the black, glassy saltwater and stripped his sodden clothes off until, clad only in his smallclothes, he curled on his side and repeated in a whisper blown across the lake, “_John, John, John, I love you John, John, John,”_ and, unable to turn away, Little watched as one of the best men he knew died alone on the ice. At some point his knees gave out, whether from exhaustion or fear or starvation or scurvy, and he collapsed, huddled in on himself in the crashed whaleship, and it was there that Lady Silence had found him.

* * *

Before he noticed the body, he noticed the mouldy biscuits and seal meat strewn across the ground. At first, Little could do nothing but acknowledge that it was _a _body, that someone had died dragging themselves after their last vestige of hope as the crew walked away, leaving only enough food for the poor bugger to live long enough to succumb to disease. It didn’t occur to Little that the man may be alive.

The first time the body spoke, Little thought it was the wind blowing through the tents. But it came again.

“Wait.”

It was the softest, most broken sound Little had ever heard. He rushed to the side of the man facedown on the rocks, rolling him onto his back. Blood was frozen into his unkempt beard, as if he had tried to pull himself over the shale with his chin. His lips were cracked and blackening, and his eyes were sunken so far back into his skull it seemed as though they were in perpetual shadow. The whites of his eyes were yellow, but it only made the pale blue of his irises unmistakeable.

“Jopson?”

“Sir?” Jopson tried to smile, but his lips cracked and began to bleed over his remaining teeth.

Little had so many questions, but Jopson could barely smile, let alone speak more than a word or two at a time. With replenished strength, Little bent and picked up the wasted frame of his friend and entered the tent he crawled out of. There were more hard, green biscuits waiting for him inside, piled like a cairn next to a sleeping bag that stunk of rot and decay. Thompson, the engineer from _Erebus, _lay stinking and rotting in a sleeping bag next to him. With Jopson in his arms, Little wasn’t able to look closer, but he knew the man was dead. He didn’t want to bring Jopson outside again, so Little tucked him into his sleeping bag and covered him with his greatcoat.

“I’m going to clear out a tent for us, Jopson. I met Silence in the ice. She fed me. She’ll come for us soon.” Jopson was still, but the rise and fall of his chest remained steady. Little removed the frozen chunks of seal meat from his greatcoat and placed them on a plate he found near Thompson’s bed after shaking the chunks of biscuit off. Assured that Jopson would be aware of his return should he awaken, Little left the tent and began searching the rest of the camp.

* * *

He quickly learned that Jopson was the only one left alive. There were five bodies spread across the three tents left; one of the marines, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Helpman had died of scurvy, and one had bled to death after having both feet amputated, no doubt by Dr. Goodsir before he had left. Little couldn’t imagine Goodsir abandoning the sick men while they were still alive, yet Jopson was clearly alive enough to drag himself out of the tent after the leaving party. The facts weren’t adding up. The last body, who Little had a habit of forgetting about, was the catatonic Davey Leys. Little thought of him as little more than a body, it was true, but Davey still drew breath and his heart still beat. His eyes stared at the canvas of the tent, unblinking, for hours on end, just as they had before Little was lost in the ice. Little did what he could, dragging the bodies into the shelter of a single tent, lined up side by side. He took their sleeping bags and whatever blankets he could find- all damp, because nothing of theirs ever dried out here- and filled the empty tent with them. He looked for nearly an hour for the carefully-stashed spirit stove that he and the other officers had hidden in case they needed to melt snow for drinking water, but it was nowhere to be found. Refusing to dwell on this any further, Little transferred Davey Leys into what would be the survivors’ tent, and returned for Jopson.

Jopson had attempted to eat the seal meat Little had left for him; there was a bloody bite mark in the side of what he thought might be a liver, but it must have been too tough for Jopson’s loose teeth set in painful gums to bite through. Removing his knife, he cut into the cold liver, shaving off tiny slivers.

“Jopson?” he said to the tangle of dark hair poking out the top of the blankets. A soft groan came from within their folds.

“I’m going to help you eat.” Little slipped behind him on his knees, lifting Jopson into his lap and letting the steward lean against the slope of his thighs. He lifted the first morsel of meat to Jopson’s lips, which parted against the gentle probing of Little’s fingers. It was strangely intimate, Little thought, as he removed his thumb and forefinger from the heat of Jopson’s mouth. He reached for the next piece, small enough to swallow without chewing, and placed it on Jopson’s tongue.

Little thought back to the beast on the ice and how it had brought its triangular head close to his, as if peering inside his mouth before blowing its hot carrion breath through his throat. He didn’t know what it meant. It could just as easily have been a warning as a promise. But as Jopson shivered against him as he swallowed the seal liver, piece by piece, Little knew it was an acknowledgement of his surrender.

* * *

As uncomfortable with the still body of Davey Leys as he was, Little still crawled into the three man sleeping bag with him. It was a cruelty to the young man, he thought, to use him for his body heat to warm Jopson between them, but Davey had somehow survived this long with nothing but the barest amount of food and without the warmth of movement to keep him from freezing. Jopson slept almost immediately; the simple act of eating seemed to have sapped him of all energy. He didn’t wake when Little scooped him up again and brought him to the tent they now occupied, one that smelled less like gangrenous tissue and human excrement.

As his fingers brushed against the curve of Jopson’s shoulder, the memory of Jopson licking the seal blood from his fingers brought him a sick sense of arousal. The slide of the other man’s dry, cracked tongue against his fingers as Little fed him every last drop of blood on the plate brought to mind a whore in Nassau who had done something similar, sucking on his fingers before guiding his hand under her skirts and pressing them into herself, riding his hand in the middle of the public house like he was her favourite toy. Little told himself it was only the memory that stirred the blood in his groin and not the piercing blue of Jopson’s eyes as they stared into his with stark clarity as his tongue worked its way down to the knuckle of his middle finger. The blood continued to pulse hot in his veins as he turned and pulled himself flush against Jopson’s back and closed his eyes.

_25 August, 1848_

The seal meat was gone. It hadn’t lasted a week feeding the three of them (_two and a half_, Little couldn’t help but think as he hauled Davey’s arm over his shoulder and took him to the stack of rocks behind camp that served as their privy when it was warm enough. Davey’s feet dragged against the shale as Little half carried him to the rocks to let him relieve himself, as he did at the end of each day). It did, however, seem to revive Jopson from the verge of death. He was able to stay awake for hours at a time, though he still experienced immeasurable amounts of pain when he tried to move his limbs. He started speaking more again, but speaking seemed to drain him of energy more than when Little would haul him up against his chest, letting him sit between his legs as he cut up the remains of the meat and hand-fed them to the steward. After the first night, Little had thought of every possibility to avoid the intimacy of the act, but he succumbed, letting himself feel the barest amount of pleasure as his fingers pushed against Jopson’s tongue.

“Thank you,” Jopson would gasp, every time.

“It’s no trouble,” Little would reply, easing Jopson back down into his blankets and asking if he needed to use the bucket that was acting as a bedpan.

“It is,” Jopson would always say, and sometimes he would whisper, “thank you for coming back for me, sir,” and Little would wonder how he ended up in this position, with two dying men relying on him for survival. But then Jopson would smile, just a twitch of the lips and a crinkling at the corners of his reddened, sunken eyes these days, and Leys would stare at the canvas wall of the tent, lips silently moving, and Little would get the strange sense that this tent, these men, were beginning to feel like home.

* * *

The next morning, Little embarked on the task he had been dreading. Holding one of Mr. Honey’s carpentry saws in one hand, he cut open the flap of the tent he had sewn the dead men into and, without looking at the face of the man nearest to him, began to saw the leg off at the knee.

He’d seen the birds when Lady Silence beckoned him to follow after she found him huddled against the bow of the whaleboat. They weren’t big, but they were food, and they were surviving somehow. Even if he wasn’t able to shoot one with the five shots he permitted himself to fire, maybe he could follow one to its nest or a food source. So he wrapped himself in the driest slops he could find and set off inland, dragging the bloody sack of meat behind him.

He had rigged up a kind of fishing rod with the leftover supplies from Mr. Honey’s carpenter’s kit that he left at the camp. If his bird hunting expedition failed, he would head to the lake where the Beast massacred his crew and hope there was something living in the lake.

Little did not know a lot about birds. He didn’t know if the white birds they had seen last winter ate meat, but he hoped that the dead man in the tent had not been mutilated for nothing. It took him an entire day of waiting to shoot a single bird who came to curiously peck at the mound of flesh on the rocks. Feeling a failure, Little held his catch by the feet as he walked back to camp.

The next day, he took the other leg off the same man and headed out onto the ice to the west, hoping to kill a seal. He was luckier this time around; a seal had crawled onto the ice near him to investigate the potential food source and was far from its hole. How he had missed it he wasn’t sure. The day was bright with the temperature sitting around freezing, so he had been sitting on his outer slops while he waited. He must have fallen asleep. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and aimed, firing once and hitting the animal in its head. It writhed on the ice, blood seeping from the hole between its eyes, and Little hoped Irving was right when he said that God was not watching here. He stood, and brought the butt of the musket down on the seal’s skull.

_14 September, 1848_

“And then I said ‘yes, Dad’ and the rest of the officers teased me mercilessly for the rest of the voyage. An entire year, sir! I doubt Sir Ross would know me, but I can’t look him in the face.” Jopson let out a quiet laugh, which turned into a long, hacking cough. There was blood on his hand when he pulled it away, but less than Little had seen a week ago.

Jopson’s health had improved tenfold since Little found him lying on the rocks. He was certain he had heard Goodsir mention the importance of fresh meat and how it could reverse the effects of scurvy remarkably quickly, but watching it happen before his eyes was like witnessing one of Christ’s miracles. They were sitting in their tent, huddled together under the blankets while the first blizzard in months blew in around them. Little realized that he needed to start a fire, but he had no stove, no matches, no coal. Lady Silence could do it, he knew, but each time he had tried to watch her, her hands worked too fast for him to keep up.

So they pressed together, him and Jopson, while Leys had at some point turned onto his right side so both he and Jopson were facing Little in their sleeping bag. Little would catch the glint of Leys’s eyes as the tent flapped and the dying light of September cut through the darkness. His silent presence was unnerving.

Jopson’s cough faded away, and he looked up through sparse eyelashes at Little. “When I’m better, will you help me cut my hair?”

Little, ignoring Leys as he did whenever it wasn’t time for the man to eat or shit, lifted a bold hand to the tangled ends of Jopson’s dark hair.

“I like it like this,” Little said, winding a greasy lock around one finger. Jopson made a look of disgust and swatted Little’s hand away.

“Don’t tease, sir. I mean it.”

“I believe we’ve reached the point in this expedition where military hierarchy has all but broken down, Mister Jopson. Please call me Edward,” Little said, brushing Jopson’s hair off his cheek and letting the coarse hair of his beard rub against his palm.

Jopson grinned. Above the missing teeth, his gums appeared to be healed. It was a beautiful sight.

“Until this expedition loses all hope, Lieutenant Little, I am proud to serve under your command.”

_15 September, 1848_

Jopson was recovering, but he was still in danger of sliding back into the throes of death if Little didn’t find them more food soon. He’d only been feeding himself every second day to allow Jopson and Leys their full rations of the last of the seal, birds, and fish he’d managed to catch. The idea of stringing bits of human flesh on a fishing hook no longer made him fight the churning in his guts, trying desperately not to vomit and waste a precious meal. After a crisis of conscience, he had flung open the flaps to the Dead Tent and let the frozen air in to preserve the bodies. _Just in case,_ he told himself.

He dreamt last night, for the first time since he had returned to the camp. He dreamed of the chilling sound that the Beast had pulled out of him on the whaleboat. He dreamed of Carnivale. He dreamed that Crozier was alive in a tent made of animal skins with Lady Silence. He dreamed that she treated his wounds with poultices made of moss and herbs, and that she used bits of wood and metal and black rock to make a fire, and when he woke, he remembered exactly what to do.

He had not seen any fresh game in days. The flapping of the entrance to the Dead Tent sounded like the flapping of wings, and each day Little resisted the temptation to lose his humanity completely and indulge in human flesh.

But it wasn’t just his choice anymore.

“What do you want, more than anything in the world?” Jopson asked him when he awoke that morning. Jopson was already awake, chest pressed against his back and close enough that his hot breath tickled Little’s ear when he asked the question.

“Right now?” Little breathed, still half asleep after his night of dreams.

“Right now,” Jopson whispered as he shifted, pressing his forehead against the back of Little’s neck.

“I think it’s obvious,” Little said, buying time before he accidentally turned and showed Jopson exactly what he wanted with his hands and his mouth and his tongue. “What do you want?”

Jopson pressed his whiskered cheek against Little’s lank, shaggy hair. “You.” Little’s heart leapt into his throat. “And me. To survive.”

_16 September, 1848_

He was so hungry. It had been days since he’d eaten more than the rock hard biscuits and chocolate left behind by the crew. Little squatted outside the tent, a pile of scavenged wood in front of him, as he struck his knife with one of the black rocks he saw Silence use in his dream. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. He let out a sigh, but whether it was out of frustration or relief he wasn’t sure. He had a subconscious bargain with himself: if he could light the fire, he would cook the meat, but if he couldn’t, God wanted him to look elsewhere. Little felt a sense of calm wash over him for the first time in weeks, and went to put the saw back into the carpentry kit.

When he opened it, he found a book of matches hidden under a tin of nails.

* * *

His idea to break down the unused tent and build a shelter against the wind for the fire was dangerous, but it was working so far. It also acted as a screen, should Jopson or Leys sit up and spy his immoral work outside the tent. As the smell of cooking meat drifted up from the pot he had unearthed among the things left behind by the crew, Little had to force himself to experience shame before satisfaction. The hunger was stronger than ever, gnawing his stomach bloody as it cramped and tightened and the biscuits left his system in one way or another before he could digest them. But now, there was food. There was _so much_ food. He had buried pieces in the snow, hoping to preserve them as long as he could. He tossed his other mitten on the fire, watching the blood-sodden wool smoke and steam before it finally caught fire. The flames leaped around it, surrounding the pot and making the meat sizzle.

“Sir?” Jopson called from inside the tent. “I think I’m hallucinating, sir. I smell…” Little heard him pause, presumably to smell the air and place the scent that he hadn’t smelled in years.

“Pork, Mister Jopson?” Little offered. He checked his current clothing for any sign of the lie he was about to tell and, satisfied his appearance wouldn’t give him away, used the sawed-off handle of an oar to drag the pot out of the fire. He entered the tent a few minutes later, grinning in an attempt to cover the utter disgust he felt with himself over his salivating mouth and rumbling stomach.

“A pack of caribou wandered across the ice pack,” Little said, unsure if Jopson and Leys (if he had the capacity to listen) would believe his lie about him hunting a caribou and its meat resembling that of a pig.

Jopson accepted the plate without question and struggled to raise himself to a seated position. Little took the plate back and gave him an admonishing look while he helped Leys to a sitting position before moving to his spot behind Jopson, who had been steadily gaining strength but still struggled to hold himself upright.

“This is yours,” Little said quietly. He noticed the most noticeable increases in Jopson’s health came after eating liver, so Little had drawn on everything he knew about human anatomy (which was, admittedly, not much) to pluck the livers from each of his ‘caribou’. Jopson settled back against his chest.

“Eat yours first,” Jopson said. “Don’t let it get cold.”

Little snorted and began to cut up Jopson’s meal for him. “Have you ever let yourself be taken care of?”

Jopson opened his mouth for the first bite of hot food he’d had since they left _Terror_. He moaned around Little’s fingers, chasing them with his tongue as they left his mouth for the plate of liver.

“You’ve taken care of me for months,” Jopson said, once he realized Little was withholding the next piece of meat in his hands until he answered the question. He opened his mouth and closed his eyes and if Little had felt sick with himself after the arousal he felt after feeding Jopson the first time, it was nothing compared to the twin floods of hot shame and arousal that filled his belly as Jopson licked the juices of another man’s flesh from his fingers.

_20 January, 1848_

Before the winter set in, Little reinforced the tent with the extra canvas from the Dead Tent. He left the fire shelter in place, though he and Jopson had discussed it and decided keeping a fire lit inside the tent was worth the risk of the tent catching fire. Jopson only regained enough strength to leave the tent earlier that week, and he donned whatever ill-fitting slops he could pull from under the sleeping bag where Leys still laid, unseeing eyes staring at the top of the tent, chest rising and falling in a steady, slow rhythm.

“It’s maddening to watch,” Jopson said, once they were outside, “how his body continues to survive while better men who fought to stay alive succumbed to disease.” Little said nothing. His resentment of Leys had been growing since the day he stumbled across his catatonic body breathing that steady, maddening rhythm, and he knew that if Jopson continued he might be able to justify the unthinkable to himself.

So he bunched up a ball of snow in his gloved hand and threw it at Jopson’s freshly trimmed beard. It hit him square in the jaw and Jopson let out a surprised sound that sounded more like a squeak than any sound a man would make. Jopson raised a mitten-clad hand to his cheek, brushing off the snow and looking at Little with his head cocked and a look of confusion. Little bent down, not breaking eye contact, to gather another handful of snow and Jopson’s features broke into a grin. He wasn’t up to running, not yet, but he ducked under Little’s carelessly lobbed snowball to gather up his own, which he hurled at Little’s chest. It exploded in a powder across the buttons of his greatcoat, and in the darkness of the long winter, the snowflakes glowed like stars. They chased each other around, never straying far from each other, until Jopson disappeared behind the tent and Little stood from where he had been gathering enough snow for his biggest snowball yet. A yell came from behind him, but before he could turn, Jopson had leapt on his back, pulled off his cap, and dumped a pile of snow on the top of his head. Little stumbled under Jopson’s weight, water streaming down his face and freezing on his cheeks until they tumbled to the ground, clinging to each other and laughing until their tears turned to ice as it dripped down their chins.

* * *

The meat they left in the fire shelter, as it continued to be called, looked simply like meat. After fretting over this once Jopson felt well enough to help Little care for Leys and stoke the fire with the wood from the boats left behind, Little allowed him to prepare the food.

It was only a few days after their game in the snow when Jopson woke Little up and told him to stay warm and not come out of the sleeping bag unless he needed to use the latrine bucket.

“Why?” Little asked. He couldn’t think of a reason for him to stay abed.

“Let me look after you today, sir.”

Little made to push back the top blanket, but Jopson stilled his hand with his own. “You saved my life, sir. Let me do _something_ to thank you.”

The low flickering of the flames inside the tent lit Jopson’s face as he squeezed Little’s hand that rested on top of the blankets.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jopson. You don’t have to-“

Jopson cut him off. “Is there _anything _I can do for you, sir?”

If Edward Little was a braver man, he would have leaned forward into the light of the fire and kissed Jopson, letting the chilly air wrap around his shoulders like a shroud while Leys stared at the ceiling of the tent beside him. But the Arctic changed him into a cautious man, so Little pulled the blankets back up around his shoulders and thanked Jopson.

* * *

“I wanted to let you rest today because this is the last of the caribou,” Jopson said over a mouthful of Mr. Thompson. “You’re clearly quite good at catching game, and of course I would be willing to go with you, but…” He trailed off, looking down at the pieces of meat he still cut small enough to swallow with minimal chewing. Little remembered the feel of Jopson’s body reclining against his chest as he licked Little’s fingers clean and felt something akin to nostalgia.

“Yes,” Little said. “I’ll go out tomorrow.”

* * *

Little didn’t sleep that night. Jopson was sleeping on his back tonight, leaving Little to curl up into his side if he wanted to share his warmth. From his position, he could see the steady rise and fall of Leys’s chest as his open eyes remained unmoving. Sometimes Little wondered if Leys had been dead this whole time and had a clockwork heart that continued to tick long after its host had expired.

When Jopson got up, wrapped himself in warmer clothing, and went to empty the latrine bucket, Little rolled into the warm spot left behind and let a hand hover over Leys’s mouth and nose, feeling for breath. There was barely a tickle against his palm. He wondered if it would be easy to hold his hand against his nose and mouth and wait until the rise and fall slowed and stopped. Little glanced at the flap of the tent. He would be caught, certainly, if he tried. As he thought, Jopson came back into the tent, hands stuffed under his armpits as he lowered the empty bucket down on the slop-carpeted tent floor. Without a word, Jopson slid into the sleeping bag in Little’s usual spot, wrapping himself around the other man’s back as he curled up against his warmth.

Little’s hope of rescue was dwindling, but he believed that if Lady Silence was returning for him, he would have to survive the winter. He felt the press of lips against the back of his neck, and Jopson’s words came back to him.

_What do you want? _

_You. And me. To survive. _

Little removed one of the mittens he wore to bed and waited until he could hear the occasional snore and snuffle against his back that signalled Jopson’s return to sleep. Before he could reconsider what he was going to do, Little reached out and clamped the mitten over Leys’s nose and mouth.

* * *

“Leys is cold, sir,” Jopson said as Little was stripping off his wet, frozen slops.

“We can bring him closer to the fire,” Little suggested, stomach twisting at the lies.

_You. Me. To survive,_ he thought.

“Sir, I- I think he’s dead, sir.”

Little forced himself to look confused, then walked over to where Leys’s cold body lay. He looked no different than the last six months when he was alive. Little let his hand hover over the dead man’s mouth and nose, feeling for the breath he had stolen last night.

“He’s dead,” Jopson said. It wasn’t a question, but Little nodded anyways. The look they exchanged carried the weight of a thousand words.

“We could…” Jopson whispered, and Little nodded again.

“There’s nothing out there,” Little said, voice cracking. The desolation of the Arctic in its perpetual darkness made his desperation all the more real.

“I won’t tell anyone, sir. If we survive.”

It was the first time Jopson admitted any doubt about their rescue.

“Nor I,” Little said. “I think, as acting leader, this expedition is over.”

_11 February, 1849_

Jopson ate his meal quietly. In the last three weeks, he hadn’t said a word about the similarity in taste between human flesh and the ‘caribou’ Little had killed at the end of summer. He was too intelligent not to know. He was also too intelligent to ask.

The meat from Leys’s body was running out and it was only February. They had cut back to half rations, and most days and nights were spent huddled together under the sleeping bag, rising only to use the latrine and add one of the few pieces of wood left to the fire. They had no way to mark the passing of the days, nor did Little care anymore. Both he and Jopson had let their whiskers grow long again, trying to insulate against the biting cold that found its way inside their tent.

“Edward,” Jopson whispered in his ear one night. They had done away with propriety when they made the decision to cannibalize one of their own.

Little _hmm_ed sleepily, rolling back into Jopson’s waiting arms. Surprised, he opened his eyes just as Jopson’s mouth crashed against his own. The light from the dying fire wasn’t enough to see the gleam of Jopson’s eyes when he threw a leg over Little’s hips and slotted their bodies together under the blankets.

“Thomas,” Little breathed as he rutted against the man on top of him, kissing him again and again until finally letting Jopson seal their mouths together and lick along his bottom lip with his tongue.

He thought about the Beast on the lake, and how its breath in his lungs seemed to mark his surrender. As Little let his hands roam up Jopson’s back, ducking under his smallclothes and grasping against sweaty skin, Little opened his mouth and surrendered.

* * *

They lay entwined, pressed so close together that Little couldn’t tell where his body and Jopson’s began. It was something he would have dreamed of in another life, a life far from here. They were both still fully dressed in layer upon layer of clothing, but as Jopson’s hand traced idle patterns across his chest, Little imagined him doing the same on his bare chest, fingers tracing the lines of his ribs and brushing over his nipples, Jopson making a comment about the amount of hair on his chest while tracing the line of hair down, past his belly button, dipping below the sheets…

“Edward,” Jopson murmured, fingers tracing out indecipherable letters across the expanse of his chest. Little found something sweet about the way Jopson would always wait for a response before continuing. Little craned his neck to press a kiss to Jopson’s forehead.

“Yes, Tom?”

“Can you promise me something?”

Little reached into their sleeping bag and found Jopson’s hand. He raised it to his mouth and kissed the palm, letting Jopson move it so it cupped Little’s cheek.

“Promise you won’t leave me, Edward?”

Little wrapped an arm around Jopson’s waist and moved them so they were face to face on their sleeping platform.

“I promise you, Thomas Jopson. I will never leave you.”

_12 February, 1849_

They pull the sledge as one, stepping in time together as they make their way back to where Crozier’s useless sextant once identified Rescue Camp. There is a single speck on the horizon that could be a serac or a white bear or a tent. Crozier does not hope anymore. If he was still interested in the months and the seasons, he would estimate it had been six months since Silence had found him and brought him into her snow house. She tended his wounds, fed him, made him strong. _Tunbaaq will not hurt me,_ her face says, and Crozier can almost feel the words enter his mind. She tells him later, through her sinew-string shapes, that there may be a survivor. _Like you,_ she gestures. _Like me._

The next morning they set out, breaking down the _iglu_ and making their way east, to find Silence’s people.

He learns that her name is Silna, and the shapes she makes with her string disappear too quickly for Crozier to identify, but the old shaman places a hand on her shoulder and touches their foreheads together.

_We will bring the dogs,_ he says in his language. Crozier has not heard anyone speak in half a year and the sound is like ice cracking underfoot. Silna touches his hand lightly and leads him to a large basin of snow carved out by the wind. There, she makes her sinew-string shapes slowly, allowing Crozier time to decipher them.

“Man,” he says, voice cracking after months of disuse. “My man?”

Silna nods, wrapping the string around her fourth finger and turning the shape of a man into a peaked triangle.

The difficulty comes after she signs _Tunbaaq_ and _man _again. Crozier shakes his head, again and again, until he remembers her words.

_Like you. Like me. _

He sees it now, that the web of strings over the shape of a man means _one who dreams_.

* * *

Crozier does not hope anymore.

The pragmatic side of him, a side that has been becoming more dormant the longer he spends with the Netsilik people, believes he will find nothing but corpses. They have been starving for months, fighting disease and frostbite and lead poisoning. There was no logical chance anyone had survived.

Crozier does not hope, but he does dream.

He dreams of the boat again, one skeleton against the bow and another a pile of bones. He dreams of Lady Jane Franklin standing in the snow, strong-willed as ever until she falls to her knees in the garden, pleading to know why God abandoned her. He sees blood spilling over the snow, a trail that leads to a wall of canvas. He hears a scream on the wind, carried to a tent that appears to be wrapped in the canvas of another. The scream gives way to sobs and then someone else is screaming something, but the wind picks up and he can’t hear anything but the pounding of blood in his ears.

Perhaps Crozier does not hope _because _he dreams.

_27 February, 1849_

When he first sees the camp, Crozier is astounded. It must show on his face because Silna gives him a look that says _you are one who dreams. Why are you surprised?_ It is the spitting image of his dream, down to the trail of blood that leads from the ice to the tent. Crozier crosses the snow towards the tent, the hide of his boots making no sound as he crushes the loose snow underfoot. He finds the entrance to the canvas enclosure, which serves as a crude antechamber for the tent. The tent is shut fast, yet he can smell the cooking meat and unwashed body smells that no doubt fill the tent. Silent as a ghost, Crozier opens the flap of the tent and enters.

* * *

“Jopson?”

Crozier’s disbelief is present in his voice. Of all his crew to have been gifted with the Second Sight, he didn’t expect it to be his steward.

As Jopson sits up and squints at his silhouette, Crozier notices he isn’t alone in the sleeping bag.

“Little?”

His First Lieutenant is pale and unconscious between the blankets, but alive.

“Captain!” Jopson’s handsome face is covered in unkempt facial hair and his hair hangs long and lank around his face. Despite this, he looks healthier than he did when Crozier saw him last. Jopson is still wrapped up in the blankets, holding Little’s shivering body against his.

“Sir, we need your help. Edward- er, Lieutenant Little is injured and he needs help. He told me that we were waiting for Lady Silence to help but if you-“ Jopson stopped talking as Silna enters the tent. She is carrying the furs she used to line their snow houses. She makes a gesture that could only be interpreted as an intent to take the blankets off, and as Jopson scrambles out of the sleeping bag, she hands him one of the fur pelts to wrap himself in. He stands close to Crozier, silent. His agitation is palpable.

Silna pulls the blankets back to expose the blackened and bloody stump where Edward Little’s left leg used to be.

* * *

“He said he was attacked,” Jopson says, once the four of them are comfortably within the walls of the snow house Crozier had tried and failed to help Silna build the day before. It was an hour’s ride from Rescue Camp.

“Was he?” Crozier asks. His voice feels rough in his throat.

Jopson turns to the supine form of Lieutenant Little and watches Silna chew and spit out a dark wad of lichen that she applies over the open wound.

“That’s what he said.”

Crozier could sense he would get no more from his former steward. He sighs, before asking himself if the answers make any difference. He watches the look on Jopson’s face turn from defiance to worry as Little moans in his sleep. Silna begins to wrap a long strip of hide around the circumference of his stump, holding the slimy poultice in place.

“He’ll live.” Crozier places a broad hand on Jopson’s shoulder. “Let me cut your hair, Tom.”


End file.
